I loved you, so I drew these tides of men into my hands and wrote my will across the sky in stars to earn you Freedom.
- T.E. Lawrence

All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act out their dream with open eyes, to make it possible.
T.E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom

Thursday, March 23, 2006

Maid Marian move over…..

My first archery lesson passed without too much incident….although one of the arrows did hit the outer edge of the target which was metal and bounced backwards unfortunately rather close to a fellow archer…however, one other mishap included part of the bow falling off as I was drawing the string resulting in a hell of a noise and my arrow flying off across the room – although I hasten to point out that was not my fault.

The archery centre is just north of Ortigas and so fairly quick to get to from home which in this city is an added bonus. It is an indoor centre and seems to be very busy all the time. The whole time I was there each of the 10 lanes was occupied…some of the other archers were from the Philippine national team and will be competing in Doha at the Asian games.

Unfortunately it seems in archery terms that I am left handed i.e. means I can only use my left eye to aim, as the only eye I can wink with is my right. This caused a certain amount of confusion at the beginning as the one left handed bow was found for me, apparently there is only one other left handed archer that attends the center…lets hope we are never there at the same time! They did spend a few minutes trying to get me to wink with my left eye…reminded me of my days at the QE when the doctor was trying to get me to write with my left hand after loosing my right thumb i.e. almost impossible!!! The other problem with being left handed is that when everyone is lined up in their lanes I have to face them which is very disconcerting.

The first lesson just consists of getting ones stance correct and firing arrows at the target. Technique is not concentrated on too much. My main problem was that I couldn’t bring myself to let go of the string of the bow to release the arrow…some mental hang up there – rather unfortunate really! However, with the exception of the two arrows mentioned above I managed to get all my arrows within the circles of the target – unfortunately no bulls eyes but I was quite pleased with just hitting the targets. Granted I was only firing at a target that was 10m away….indoor archery standard is 18m.

I have to say my right shoulder and right hand are definitely feeling it today!

It is enjoyable, not as much fun as fencing and not as all consuming as fencing. When fencing your mind is completely on the game for long periods of time however, with archery you concentrate for the few seconds it takes to fire the arrow and then that’s it.

As you can see from the picture below, everyone faces one way in their lanes. I was standing facing t’other way…not fun!

6 Comments:

I remember playing with bows and arrows in summer camp as a young lad. We had much cheaper and simpler equipment in those days.

The bows were actually quite small and one could draw the string far enough back so that the tip of the arrow would lodge into the back part of the bow, creating a a dangerous taught and ready to fire bow and arrow being hangled by wise ass city folk teenagers.

One time a young lad or lass panicked when this happened and they dropped the whole contraption on the ground to run for cover. Fortunately, it didn't dislodge and shoot when it hit the ground potentially severely injuring or killing one of the campers.

I remember too that the camp counseler was not too pleased about all of this.